Galaxy S8 Will Have No Physical Home Button Like iPhone 8

Despite rumors making their way around the internet in the last week suggesting that Samsung’s next flagship the Galaxy S8 would have its fingerprint sensor in the screen like the iPhone 8(?), new reports (rumors really) suggest that Samsung will be placing the sensor on or under the rear camera array.

Conflicting reports/rumors in just a week’s time regarding Galaxy S8

As with all rumors, please take the following with a grain of salt. Until Samsung officially unveils the Galaxy S8, nothing is written in stone. If the past is anything to go by and it generally is with Samsung, the company will unveil its new flagship handset at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in February with the phone going on sale in March.

That said, Samsung has had anything but a normal year with the ultimate halt of Galaxy Note 7 manufacturing following two recalls due to its propensity to explode, burst into flames, or simply melt. Unfortunately for the company, this wasn’t limited to the Galaxy Note 7, and there were a few cases of troubles with the Galaxy S7, which many tech writers believe was the best smartphone produced last year. Due to this (over $6 billion) hiccup, the release of the Galaxy S8 may be delayed as Samsung absolutely must get it right this time.

“Since the phones have a record of burning up, it needs time for these phones to be verified as safe. How safe the phones turn out to be is more important than any hardware innovation,’’ Greg Roh, an analyst at HMC Investment Securities Co., told Bloomberg last week. “It will take about a month or two for people to actually start opening their pockets,” he said.

Last week, Bloomberg (which is hardly a rumor mill) reported that Samsung would be doing away with its physical home button just as Apple hopes to do with the iPhone 8 as a patent suggests. It also suggested that embedded in the screen would be the Galaxy S8’s fingerprint sensor. However, a new set of rumors is debunking the latter and the plurality of this week’s rumors have the fingerprint sensor in the back of the 2017 flagship.

Where will that rear fingerprint sensor find itself on the Galaxy S8?

It’s largely anticipated that Apple will finally be able to do away with the physical home button in the iPhone 8. It came close, but it’s not quite there yet.

According to the Korean website Naver, the S8 body is a done deal. The physical home button will not invade the all-screen front of the flagship, and there will also be an iris scanner on the front of the S8 for added security. Samsung has a patent to build the fingerprint sensor into one of the two cameras that will make up the rear side of the Galaxy S8. If Samsung is unable to work that out in time, it’s expected that sensor will lie just beneath the two cameras that will make up the first dual camera system that Samsung has employed in its Galaxy line.

Once again, a grain of salt is required, and I have little doubt that I’ll write something wholly contradictory to something I’ve said today before Samsung finally shows the world what it’s doing with the S8 after a year the company would clearly like to forget.